It’s an idea proposed by Ipstenu that might just work. The gist of her suggestion is to manage widgets similar to how we manage menus. Instead of all that fancy drag and drop stuff, we switch to a check box approach where users can check which widgets they want to have added to a particular sidebar. Judging by the comments left on that post, a number of people feel that her concept is a great idea and should be considered when the time to rework the widget management area arrives. Drag and drop was cool when it arrived but having 3-5 sidebars with 30 available widgets makes drag and drop not so cool anymore. ∞
Help Me Cleanup The Ideas Forum
For those of you that have been following me on Twitter, I’ve referenced the ideas forum quite a bit. I’ve been keeping it under wraps because there was less of a chance of running into people responding to the same ideas but since Jane Wells has made the work more public today, (Highly appreciated by the way) it’s time I make the call for help to clean up that place.
What I’ve been doing is browsing the ideas that are filed Under Consideration and working my way from the last page to the front. So far, it’s been pretty funny to read some of the ideas submitted by some notable community members that today, can code up their own solutions to problems. I guess if you’re given three years, you have the opportunity to learn a thing or two. At any rate, here are the directions to help me with the ideas forum.
If you want to help (this is an easy way to contribute for those who aren’t coders), go to http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/view/considering and start looking at threads. Start from the pages at the back of the list, and on each one you can help resolve:
- Read the thread.
- If you don’t know if something exists as a plugin or has been implemented, use Google.
- Add a comment to the thread indicating the status/outcome. If you found an appropriate plugin, link to it.
- Add the “modlook” tag.
- Bask in the glow of knowing that this small task is part of a big job, and is much appreciated by the community.
The sooner we get the old ideas cleared out of there, the sooner it can become more useful as a discussion tool (and clear up Trac to focus on accepted features and enhancements).
So if you have any spare time or are just bored, feel free to go through a page or two of ideas and update them. I’ve actually found a few ideas that are three years old that still have merit and are worthy of still being considered for future versions of WordPress. If you don’t know of any way to answer the idea, move along to the next one and save it for someone that does know.
Security Roundtable Discussion
This weeks edition of WordPress Weekly will be an open mic roundtable centered around the topic of security. We’ll talk about security practices, things to avoid doing to make upgrading a harder process, the entire situation surrounding the worm that hit older versions of WordPress, ideas for what WordPress can do better, etc. I highly encourage you to call in and speak your mind if you’re interested in the topic of WordPress and security.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to remind you of a few things regarding the show. If you would like to receive an email reminder for when the next episode of WordPress Weekly will be recorded, you need to register an account with Talkshoe.com, visit the WordPress Weekly Talkshoe page and click on the Follow button. This will add your accounts email address to the list.
If you have a Talkshoe account, I’d appreciate if you would stop by the WordPress Weekly Talkshoe page and not only rate the show, but also chime in with a review. On the right hand side, you’ll see five purple bubbles 1-5. Just click on the one that matches the rating you want to give the show. For example, click on the third bubble if you want to rate the show 3 out of 5. Below the rating, you can click on the Write A Full Comment link to give me feedback regarding the show.
Last but not least, if you can review the show on iTunes with a comment I’d appreciate that as well. Hope to see you tune in this Tuesday to chat security with us.
WordPress Idea Roundup
The last I heard about the ideas section of WordPress was that Jane Wells was cleaning up the place to prepare it for an upgrade to bbPress 1.0. Not sure how the progress is going but upon checking my feedreader this morning, I noticed some ideas starting to trickle in. Here is a small sampling.
Enhanced Author Widget – I wish there was a plugin to add am Author widget to the Widget section with options to display the avatar, to display a list of the posts (possibly with thumbnails generated from the articles next them), links to author’s pages on social networking sites, etc.
Offer Usage Stats To Plugin Authors – We can see how many downloads our plugins have, and from comments Matt M. has made we know there are stats on how many blogs a plugin is active on. It would be nice to make that available to the plugin author (maybe on the admin page where the SVN info, etc is). No personal information, just a simple “Installed/Active in ## sites”
I’ve talked with many plugin authors and plenty of them tell me this sort of information would be great to have. If you’re a plugin author and like this idea, I say go on over and voice your feedback, perhaps even include some information you’d like to see in the stats page.
Conditional Tags For ‘if pings’ or if trackbacks. - But now that we have the option to split comments and trackbacks up when displaying in our comments section, there is a small problem: there’s no conditional tag to say “if there’s trackbacks” or “if there’s pings” so we can keep the trackbacks list silent until there’s actually a trackback. The problem is that, with the new formulation, we end up with a non-XHTML-compliant ol or ul with no li in the middle.
While I don’t mind discussion of these ideas here, the discussion would be better placed on the actual ideas page. You can use your WordPress forum user account to login to the ideas forum.
Keeping An Eye Out For Post Ideas
WeblogToolsCollection.com recently published an article that discussed how to develop post ideas. Near the end, the author wanted to know what individuals did to generate post ideas on their own and quite a few people responded in the comments. Most people used the drafts section of WordPress to write down a block of notes for a particular post and then saved it for future use. Others used a text file on their desktop, sticky notes, note taking applications, etc. As a blogger myself, I thought I’d share my tips and techniques for how I generate ideas for posts. This list is in no particular order.
Twitter – Without a doubt, the biggest source of ideas to write about has come from Twitter. The WPTavern twitter account follows 237 people, 95% of these folks have something to do with WordPress. Through theme and their streams, I get links to interesting sites, ideas, discussions, etc. For a long time, I practically stopped using my feedreader in place of Twitter because it was that effective for me.
RSS – It’s interesting that just the other day, Adii of WooThemes asked this question:
I seem to get most of the most important news stories via Twitter. so why bother with RSS?
The short answer is, Twitter can’t give you the scoop on everything WordPress related and that is how I maximize my use of RSS. While Twitter is the pulse of what is going on right now, RSS and the feeds I have subscribed to provide me a bigger picture with regards to what is happening with WordPress. Everything from development to plugin and theme releases, RSS does a great job at filling the gaps that Twitter leaves open. I can’t tell you how often I’ve found a great story in my feedreader that was not mentioned on Twitter. Also, you have to subscribe to feeds and searches which give you a non-WordPress community perspective on things. Too much in-house linking and you begin to lose focus on the bigger picture.
Comments – I envy those blogs who have an intelligent audience such as the case with WPTavern.com. All too often throughout a conversation, I’ll see bits and pieces of opinions or topics that generate new posts ideas. Whether it be the passing on of a link to a relevant article or a plugin that fixes a problem, I’ve always enjoyed reading thoughtful comments which continue the conversation rather than derail it. Comments are like additional food for thought.
Normal Conversation – Whether I’m chatting in IRC, on Skype, or through any other real-time means of communication, I’m always on the lookout for ideas to talk about. There have been many times where I’ve conversed with someone about a particular topic I had in mind and because of the conversation, I’ve changed the way I was going to write the post or, I come up with two posts on the subject.
Community – Luckily, I have a strong community of folks who participate on the forum and who I communicate with on a daily basis. If they find something interesting or newsworthy, they generally say so on the forum or send it to me in an email.
Not Thinking About The Topics – To be honest, this is when I think of post ideas the most. When I’m not thinking about the subject. When I’m reading a magazine or when I’m outside on a hike, I’m thinking about things I’ve written already or things I’ve seen pop up and I have time to formulate ideas or ways to approach the topic for a future post. This is also when I have free time to think of random, insane ideas which are always fun as they challenge my imagination.
Note Taking:
This is the point where I think most people will be shocked in that, I don’t write down ideas or write draft posts. I’m one of those people that if an idea is flowing or I need to write a post, I do so right then and there either on my iPhone or in the write panel. Although because of the iPhone, I’ll sometimes just write the majority of my thoughts regarding the topic and then attack it again once I reach a desktop or my notebook. That’s as far as I go with drafts.
The bottom line is, I am open minded to any and all ideas. I’m always on the lookout for them and thankfully, I have a knack of choosing some good ones to write about.
Your Plugin Ideas Are Needed
John Kolbert, who wants to enter this years plugin competition has a problem. He is out of ideas. What better place or group of people to ask than the Tavern community? Stop by the forum thread we have going on and share your thoughts or ideas on plugins you would love to have created which don’t exist yet.
An Idea For WordPress Ideas
Just wondering if it’s time to wipe the slate clean on the WordPress Ideas site to start over? The reason being is that the top five most popular ideas are ideas which were submitted over two years ago. If you ask me, this looks bad as it tends to lean towards the WordPress project not really implementing ideas that are obviously wanted by quite a few people using the software. On the flip side, many of the ideas that are still labeled as UNDER CONSIDERATION have since made it to the core in one version or another. Am I wrong or is this simply a case of someone or a group of people not supplying patches to address those issues? Another reason to wipe the slate clean is that all ideas from that day forward should be relevant with how the software is today and not how it was two years ago. So even though the public’s desire for a specific feature two years ago was high, that might not be the case currently and we have no way of knowing.
If the Ideas site is not going to be wiped clean, then there needs to at least be a user driven way to flag a particular idea as IMPLEMENTED with a small explanation of when and how that idea has been implemented into the core of WordPress. This would definitely give the sense that the peoples voices/ideas are heard. As a side benefit, you could probably take a look at all of the implemented ideas and get a good handle on where the project is headed in the near future.
The Ideas part of the WordPress project is another example of something I’ve been noticing as of late and that is, the core WordPress project getting most of the attention which it should, but various branches of the project are dying because of the lack of attention to them. From what I know, Matt is the guy in charge of the ideas section and if this is true, I hope he plans on having a few people in the wings to help him out. WordPress is far more popular today than it was a few years ago and perhaps the Ideas part of the project has lost its precedence. While I would like for all branches of the WordPress tree to be tended too on the same pace as the trunk, I’m guessing that the scope of the project as well as the low amount of Core Developers prevents this from happening. That is why I believe implementing a few different methods to allow the average joe community members to help out would be beneficial to the overall project.
Of course, you’d still need someone taking care of the administration/validation work, but at least the initial load would be taken off their back.
You know, I could have just published this post as an idea to the WordPress Ideas site but why? From the outside looking in, I see ideas that have been voted upon for over two years which to a new person, would seem as though WordPress has not yet added them to the core. However, since I have experience with the software since version 2.3, I know a few ideas which have been implemented that are still labeled as Under Consideration. So why then would I submit an idea if all of the other ideas seemingly have not been addressed or at least, modified to represent the software in its current state?
To top things off, I don’t even know who to contact with regards to the Ideas Section of the WordPress.org site. Do I bring this issue up on the WordPress.org forum? Do I submit this to the WP-Hackers mailing list in fear of publishing something that doesn’t belong their? Do I email Matt and hope that my particular email does not fall victim to the amount of noise his inbox already experiences? One thing that I’ve become increasingly frustrated with regarding the entire WordPress Project is the lack of a WordPress Whitepages. I have no idea on who to contact for what part of the project. If I can’t figure out who to contact, I fall back on just contacting Matt but that isn’t the way it should work. I wish there were some sort of central directory of contact information, most likely a page on the Codex with relatively updated information so that end users knew who to contact and for what purpose.
I started with an idea but ended with a rant. I suppose if I really want a solution to some of these problems, I should get off my ass and do something about it myself. So with that in mind, look forward to a WordPress Contact directory that I’ll publish first on this blog, and then get it implemented onto the Codex where I hope others will contribute.
Is WordPress Porn A Good Idea?
A quick look at the most recently submitted WordPress ideas and it appears as though spam has once again been able to creep onto the site. However, the ideas section is not the only one to feel the onslaught of spam. The WordPress Hackers mailing list as well as the Testers mailing list every now and then gets a few spam messages. But more notably, the WordPress.org forum appears to receive spam posts every day. Unlike most other forums or registration forms, the one used on WordPress.org does not contain any CAPTCHA images or any anti-spam measures. This could be the reason behind the spam getting through which is then seen by quite a few people. Although I must say, the administrators/moderators do a great job of tracking that stuff down and keeping it at bay but they can’t catch them all, at least initially.
WordPress.org Registration Form
To top things off, both the Ideas and WordPress.org Support forum don’t provide much in the way of post reporting. At least in the forum, if you come across inappropriate content, you’re supposed to flag that thread by adding the tag ‘modlook‘. This seems to have worked thus far but the technique requires that end users read the Forum Rules Forum Post which outlines this method. But who reads rules now a days? Perhaps a REPORT button which is added to every forum thread or post which automates the task of adding the modlook tag would work out better with regards to community moderation?
With regards to the WordPress Ideas site, there is no RULES page which explains the type of content that can be added to that section of the site although each idea can have tags attached to it. Suffice to say, end users can add the modlook tag to ideas which need moderation but again, this requires prior knowledge on the end users part. Something a simple graphic button that says REPORT might be able to handle better. At least one member has proposed an idea similar to the one I just described which can be read here.
While I don’t venture into the Ideas site or the WordPress.org Forums as much as I’d like, it’s a bit concerning to visit those pages and see anywhere between 1-5 spam posts.
By the way, at least one person thought Pornamzon was a poor idea. See for yourself.
One Star For Porn Idea
Now I ask that you join in on the conversation by offering your thoughts on the spam problem the various WordPress sites/mailing lists are dealing with. What are some of your ideas on how the team could better handle the situation?